Recently, Forrester picked apart and compared the Active
Directory management offerings from the largest players in the space. This is a
market that continues to grow and where players are jockeying for position,
making strategic acquisitions, and refocusing their solutions. Symantec doubled
down on auditing and compliance by rolling their BindView solutions into their
broader suite. Quest Software acquired ScriptLogic – a move that certainly
helps them better target the mid market. Beyond all of that, we see a few
factors and trends that will shape this space in 2008 and further down the road
like:

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It's the end of year and, along with the winter gusts here in New England comes a similar bluster - that of the analysts' predictions. Given my penchant for bluster and the fact that nothing helps pass a long winter's day than writing fanciful predictions, I've got one of my own.

In all seriousness, 2008 will prove to be the year that witnesses the dawn of Mobile Operations. "What's that? Mobile Operations? Don't you mean IT Operations," you say? Yes, this new sub-role, which will be getting a fair deal of coverage and, with any luck, some hard-data and real-world examples of how organizations will be merging mobile voice, mobile data, wireless infrastructure, devices and device management into one, central IT function. This movement by IT organizations, which we expect to see take shape over the course of 2008, will reduce de-duplication of tasks, allow for synergies in managing device and the increase the potential for pooled negotiations with vendors and carriers.

Keep an eye out for January's upcoming research Key Wireless Trends That Will Shape Enterprise Mobility In 2008 which will discuss the role and trend in more detail.

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Microsoft recently released the final version of Exchange Server 2007 SP1, bringing many features into production that didn’t make the cut for the original RTM. Some of the more notable enhancements include improvements to Outlook Web Access (OWA) and the management console and native IPv6 support. Arguably the most significant addition is Standby Continuous Replication (SCR). SCR enables organizations to replicate storage groups to stand-by servers or clusters at remote or secondary data centers. The SCR target can be manually activated if there is a failure at the primary data center. Existing disaster recovery (DR) solutions using native Microsoft tools were scarce and complex, especially compared to other platforms like Domino. To date, third parties like Symantec, NetApp, and Mimosa Systems have filled the gap for customers looking for true rapid failover in site-level failures, but some companies like to see more native options. SCR could be an interesting alternative for firms looking to balance cost and their recovery SLA's.

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The element of piracy always presents Microsoft with a difficult choice in how best to protect its intellectual property. Measures that are too lax could contribute to an uptake in unlicensed deployments and lost licensing revenue while more draconian techniques could threaten adoption of their products and place an unnecessary management burden on their paying customers. The software giant always has a formidable task in finding a balance between the two extremes and determining the best course of action with regard to protecting their products. Take the example of a university with a compromised Windows Server volume license key, posted by a student administrator on to the Internet for “sharing.” Installations using the key pop up around the globe, forcing Microsoft to invalidate the key. Software pirates around the globe shrug their shoulders and move on to the next key on their list while the university is stuck cleaning up the mess resulting from having a now invalid key.

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As mentioned in my last post, I was recently at Cisco’s C-Scape. One reporter asked me to comment on my thoughts regarding a specific announcement (if you can call it that): Cisco will begin go to open up IOS. So you’ve probably got the same question I had: ‘What does “open” mean?’ As best I can tell, it means providing some standards-based APIs so that IOS can be controlled by third-party applications and infrastructure. Seems interesting, but I feel there’s more to it than that.

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Today, Sprint Nextel announced Dan Hesse would be filling the role of CEO, a position vacated in October by Gary Forsee. Hesse, coming most recently from Sprint MVNO Embarq – one of only two carriers in the US to offer Dual-Mode calling over WiFi – may prove to be a strategically minded, advanced-technology maven with the telecoms experience that can bring some much needed success in enterprise and consumer business to Sprint Hesse will face three major challenges, his success on all of which Sprint’s success ultimately rests:

Microsoft released their official beta of Hyper-V on Thursday,
taking a step towards getting their next-generation server virtualization
solution out the door. The release did come as somewhat of a surprise. The beta
was due to be released along with the RTM of Windows Server 2008, and when that
was delayed into Q1 it left us to question what the state of Hyper-V’s beta
release was. The guidance has not changed however around the release of the
final version — it’s still 180 days from the RTM of Windows Server 2008, not
from this release of the beta.

It’s that time of year. You know: shopping for the holidays, wrapping up end-of-year projects, and the annual Cisco analyst conference, now called C-Scape. OK, so maybe it’s not that big, but it has become an interesting event that acts a proxy for the overall networking industry. This year was a dramatic difference from years past. Namely, it was a lot more conversation with many more panels and breakouts. However, it was also noteworthy in that there was really no news! Cisco didn’t use this as a venue to announce any products or major initiatives. In fact, when I bumped into Matt Hamblen he commented that many of the journalists in attendance were bored! However, there were some interesting nuggets for those that follow Cisco:

As
Forrester has recently written,
we think desktop operations professionals will start to get serious about deploying
Windows Vista enterprise-wide after the release of SP1. Our conversations with
clients have varied in scope but include businesses that:

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On December 10th, 2007, 3PAR announced a partnership with HP and VMware to promote a high performance infrastructure architecture that a group of large customers developed, implemented, and validated. Customer references include marquee companies Deutsche Bank, Hilton, Savvis, and Ariba. Coined “3CV,” which stands for “3” Par, HP “C” Class Blade Center, and “V” Mware, the architecture is said to reduce total hardware acquisition cost, cut power consumption, and increase the agility of provisioning, as well as enable consolidation through security at the virtualization layer rather than through physical separation.